MoMA's contribution to modern
architecture in America began before it moved to its present
building. In 1932 Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson
organized a major show of contemporary European and American
architecture, under the title 'Modern Architecture: International
Exhibition'. The show, which toured nationally, brought European
architectural developments to a wide audience in America. In the
title of the tour and its accompanying book, Hitchcock and Johnson
coined the phrase 'The International Style':

'...a style expressing several
design principles: a concern with volume as opposed to mass and
solidity. regularity as opposed to axial symmetry, and the
proscription of "arbitrary applied decoration."'

'Hitchcock and Johnson, however,
embraced the movement represented by Le Corbusier and Mies more
for its novelty as a style than for its potential as social
theory. For these museum curators, who were both well-born and
thoroughly insulated from the harsher social realities with
which the radical Europeans were grappling, Modernism meant
something almost entirely aesthetic. Indeed, Johnson was to
insist for the rest of his architectural career on the futility
of addressing social issues through architecture. In the
introduction to their book, Alfred Barr [director of MoMA]
declared that "It should be made clear that the aesthetic
qualities of the Style are the principal concerns of the
authors," noting that they had made "little attempt to present
here the technical or sociological aspects of the style except
in so far as they are related to problems of design."'

Carter Wiseman, Shaping a Nation,
1998

MoMA followed this exhibition by
building for itself the first 'International Style' building in
America, in 1939.

Since then, Philip Johnson - who
became the museum's first director of MoMA's department of
architecture, but left in 1934 - created a new wing in 1953; in 1984
Cesar Pelli created a controversial 53-story residential tower on
top of the museum, to raise money needed for the museum's growth;
and a further expansion by Yoshio Taniguchi is currently in progress
(2001).

How to visit

The museum is on the North side of
53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. For information on
opening times and tours - and exhibitions - call +1 212 708 9480 or
visit
http://www.moma.org/.

The museum is currently undergoing
building works, as part of a major expansion and renovation by
Yoshio Taniguchi.

The neighborhood's other star
attraction: the local branch of the New York Public Library, right
across the street from the MoMA entrance, keeps on display the
original Winnie the Pooh and his friends (Christopher Robin's
original toys, well pre-Disney).

This institution was founded with the support
of Abby Aldrich Rockefeller and other members of New York's wealthy
elite who had embraced modern art in the 1920s and 1930s. Its primary
goal was to popularize modern art in the United States by making this
heretofore European phenomenon accessable to the general public.

In 1929, the Museum opened in an existing
building on 57th Street. In 1935, the Rockefeller House and its land
were donated to the Museum. This became the core of the new museum's
site. Stone and Goodwin's design for the initial building is an early
tribute to modern architecture which had been gaining currency in Europe
for over 15 years. Its flat, unornamented facade is clad with a veneer
of marble, opaque glass and transparent glass. A simple pierced concrete
awning caps the top floor. In keeping with the principles of le
Courbusier (the formost architect of this new style), the structure is
topped with a roof garden. A number of additions attest to the success
and popularity of modern art. Philip Johnson added a west wing in 1951
(now the site of the MoMA Tower), as well as an east wing and the widely
admired sculpture garden in 1964.

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is a preeminent art museum located in
Midtown Manhattan in New York City, USA, on 53rd Street, between Fifth
and Sixth Avenues. It has been singularly important in developing and
collecting modernist art, and is often identified as the most
influential museum of modern art in the world.[1] The museum's
collection offers an unparalleled overview of modern and contemporary
art, [2] including works of architecture and design, drawings, painting,
sculpture, photography, prints, illustrated books, film, and electronic
media.

MoMA's library and archives hold over 300,000 books, artist books, and
periodicals, as well as individual files on more than 70,000 artists.
The archives contain primary source material related to the history of
modern and contemporary art.

History
The idea for the Museum of Modern Art was developed in 1928 primarily by
Abby Aldrich Rockefeller[citation needed] (wife of John D. Rockefeller
Jr.) and two of her friends, Lillie P. Bliss and Mrs Cornelius J.
Sullivan. They became known variously as "the Ladies", "the daring
ladies" and "the adamantine ladies". They rented modest quarters for the
new museum and it opened to the public on November 7, 1929, nine days
after the Wall Street Crash. Abby had invited A. Conger Goodyear, the
former president of the board of trustees of the Albright Art Gallery in
Buffalo, New York, to become president of the new museum. Abby became
treasurer. At the time, it was America's premier American museum devoted
exclusively to modern art, and the first of its kind in Manhattan to
exhibit European modernism.

Goodyear enlisted Paul J. Sachs and Frank Crowninshield to join him as
founding trustees. Sachs, the associate director and curator of prints
and drawings at the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, was referred
to in those days as a collector of curators. Goodyear asked him to
recommend a director and Sachs suggested Alfred H. Barr Jr., a promising
young protege. Under Barr's guidance, the museum's holdings quickly
expanded from an initial gift of eight prints and one drawing. Its first
successful loan exhibition was in November 1929, displaying paintings by
Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cezanne, and Seurat.

First housed in six rooms of galleries and offices on the twelfth floor
of Manhattan's Heckscher Building, on the corner of Fifth Avenue and
57th Street, the museum moved into three more temporary locations within
the next ten years. Abby's husband was adamantly opposed to the museum
(as well as to modern art itself) and refused to release funds for the
venture, which had to be obtained from other sources and resulted in the
frequent shifts of location. Nevertheless, he eventually donated the
land for the current site of the Museum, plus other gifts over time, and
thus became in effect one of its greatest benefactors.

During that time it initiated many more exhibitions of noted artists,
such as the lone Vincent van Gogh exhibition on November 4, 1935.
Containing an unprecedented sixty-six oils and fifty drawings from the
Netherlands, and poignant excerpts from the artist's letters, it was a
major public success and became "a precursor to the hold van Gogh has to
this day on the contemporary imagination".

The museum also gained international prominence with the hugely
successful and now famous Picasso retrospective of 1939-40, held in
conjunction with the Art Institute of Chicago. In its range of presented
works, it represented a significant reinterpretation of Picasso for
future art scholars and historians. This was wholly masterminded by
Barr, a Picasso enthusiast, and lionized the greatest artist of the
time, setting the model for all the museum's retrospectives that were to
follow.

When Abby Rockefeller's son Nelson was selected by the board of trustees
to become its flamboyant president in 1939, at the age of thirty, he
became the prime instigator and funder of its publicity, acquisitions
and subsequent expansion into new headquarters on 53rd Street. His
brother, David Rockefeller, also joined the Museum's board of trustees,
in 1948, and took over the presidency when Nelson took up position as
Governor of New York in 1958.

David subsequently employed the noted architect Philip Johnson to
redesign the Museum garden and name it in honor of his mother, the Abby
Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden. He and the Rockefeller family in
general have retained a close association with the Museum throughout its
history, with the Rockefeller Brothers Fund funding the institution
since 1947. Both David Rockefeller, Jr. and Sharon Percy Rockefeller
(wife of Senator Jay Rockefeller) currently sit on the board of
trustees.

In 1937, MoMA had shifted to offices and basement galleries in the Time
& Life Building in Rockefeller Center. Its permanent and current home,
now renovated, designed in the International Style by the modernist
architects Philip C. Johnson and Edward Durell Stone, opened to the
public on May 10, 1939, attended by an illustrious company of 6,000
people, and with an opening address via radio from the White House by
President Franklin D. Roosevelt.[8]

Artworks
Considered by many to have the best collection of modern Western
masterpieces in the world, MoMA's holdings include more than 150,000
individual pieces in addition to approximately 22,000 films and 4
million film stills. The collection houses such important and familiar
works as the following:

It also holds works by a wide range of influential American artists
including Cindy Sherman, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jasper Johns, Edward
Hopper, Chuck Close, Georgia O'Keefe, and Ralph Bakshi.

MoMA developed a world-renowned art photography collection, first under
Edward Steichen and then John Szarkowski, as well as an important film
collection under the Museum of Modern Art Department of Film and Video.
The film collection owns prints of many familiar feature-length movies,
including Citizen Kane and Vertigo, but the department's holdings also
contains many less-traditional pieces, including Andy Warhol's
eight-hour Empire and Chris Cunningham's music video for Björk's All Is
Full of Love. MoMA also has an important design collection, which
includes works from such legendary designers as Paul László, the
Eameses, Isamu Noguchi, and George Nelson. The design collection also
contains many industrial and manufactured pieces, ranging from a
self-aligning ball bearing to an entire Bell 47D1 helicopter.

Renovation

Inside the MoMA building.MoMA's midtown location underwent extensive
renovations in the 2000s, closing on May 21, 2002 and reopening to the
public in a building redesigned by the Japanese architect Yoshio
Taniguchi, on November 20, 2004. From June 29, 2002 until September 27,
2004, a portion of its collection was on display in what was dubbed MoMA
QNS, a former Swingline staple factory in the Long Island City section
of Queens.

The renovation project nearly doubled the space for MoMA's exhibitions
and programs and features 630,000 square feet of new and redesigned
space. The Peggy and David Rockefeller Building on the western portion
of the site houses the main exhibition galleries, and The Lewis B. and
Dorothy Cullman Education and Research Building on the eastern portion
provides over five times more space for classrooms, auditoriums, teacher
training workshops, and the Museum's expanded Library and Archives.
These two buildings frame the enlarged Abby Aldrich Rockefeller
Sculpture Garden, home to two works by Richard Serra.

MoMA's reopening brought controversy as its admission cost increased
from US$12 to US$20, making it one of the most expensive museums in the
city; however it has free entry on Fridays after 4pm, thanks to
sponsorship from Target Stores. The architecture of the renovation is
controversial. At its opening, some critics thought that Taniguchi's
design was a fine example of contemporary architecture, while many
others were extremely displeased with certain aspects of the design,
such as the flow of the space.[9][10][11]

MoMA has seen its average number of visitors rise to 2.5 million from
about 1.5 million a year before its new granite and glass renovation.
The museum's director, Glenn D. Lowry, expects average visitor numbers
eventually to settle in at around 2.1 million.[12]

Further reading
Fitzgerald, Michael C. Making Modernism: Picasso and the Creation of the
Market for Twentieth-Century Art. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
1995.
Harr, John Ensor and Peter J. Johnson. The Rockefeller Century: Three
Generations of America's Greatest Family. New York: Charles Scribner's
Sons, 1988.
Kert, Bernice. Abby Aldrich Rockefeller: The Woman in the Family. New
York: Random House, 1993.
Lynes, Russell, Good Old Modern: An Intimate Portrait of the Museum of
Modern Art, New York: Athenaeum, 1973.
Reich, Cary. The Life of Nelson A. Rockefeller: Worlds to Conquer
1908-1958. New York: Doubleday, 1996.
Rockefeller, David. Memoirs. New York: Random House, 2002.
Schulze, Franz. Philip Johnson: Life and Work. Chicago: University Of
Chicago Press, 1996.

References
^ Kleiner, Fred S.; Christin J. Mamiya (2005). "The Development of
Modernist Art : The Early 20th Century", Gardner's Art Through The Ages
: The Western Perspective. Thomson Wadsworth, 796. ISBN 0495004782. “The
Museum of Modern Art in New York City is consistently identified as the
institution most responsible for developing modernist art ... the most
influential museum of modern art in the world.”
^ http://www.newyorkartworld.com/museums/momamuseum.html
^ First modern art museum featuring European works in Manhattan -
Michael FitzGerald, Making Modernism: Picasso and the Creation of the
Market for Twentieth-Century Art. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
1995. (p. 120)
^ Origins of MoMA and first successful loan exhibition - see John Ensor
Harr and Peter J. Johnson, The Rockefeller Century: Three Generations of
America's Greatest Family, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1988.
(pp.217-18)
^ John D. Rockefeller, Jr. one of MoMA's greatest benefactors - see
Bernice Kert, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller: The Woman in the Family. New
York: Random House, 1993. (pp.376,386)
^ Precursor to the current hold of van Gogh in public imagination -
Ibid., (p.376)
^ MoMA's international prominence through the Picasso retrospective of
1939-40 - see FitzGerald, op.cit. (pp.243-62)
^ Time Magazine. 1939: The formal opening of MoMA
^ Updike, John (2004-11-15). Invisible Cathedral. The New Yorker.
Retrieved on 2007-02-27. “Nothing in the new building is obtrusive,
nothing is cheap. It feels breathless with unspared expense. It has the
enchantment of a bank after hours, of a honeycomb emptied of honey and
flooded with a soft glow.”
^ Smith, Roberta (2006-11-01). Tate Modern's Rightness Versus MoMA's
Wrongs. New York Times. Retrieved on 2007-02-27. “The museum’s big,
bleak, irrevocably formal lobby atrium ... is space that the Modern
could ill afford to waste, and such frivolousness continues in its
visitor amenities: the hard-to-find escalators and elevators, the
too-narrow glass-sided bridges, the two-star restaurant on prime garden
real estate where there should be an affordable cafeteria ...Yoshio
Taniguchi’s MoMA is a beautiful building that plainly doesn’t work.”
^ Rybczynski, Witold (2005-03-30). Street Cred: Another Way of Looking
at the New MOMA. Slate.com. Retrieved on 2007-02-27.
^ "Build Your Dream, Hold Your Breath." 6 August 2006 The New York
Times.

MoMA's new architect

by Walter Robinson

In keeping with its global vision of the 21st-century art museum, the
Museum of Modern Art has chosen Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi to
design its new expansion and renovation. Tanaguchi's design will reshape
the entire museum, moving the main entrance around to 54th Street,
restoring the museum's famous garden to its original proportions and
adding a new grand stairway and entrance atrium. Major new construction
will include the addition of a seven-story annex structure for painting
and sculpture galleries on the present site of the Dorset Hotel.

The redesign makes the garden central to the museum's reconfigured ground
floor spaces, and also brings the lines of Cesar Pelli's 52-story museum
tower down to grade level, emphasizing the "urban character" of the
museum, as MoMA architecture curator Terry Riley put it. The project
calls for underground excavation on both the Dorset Hotel site and under
the garden to create a new theater and an expanded department of video
and film. The Goodwin-Stone facade, presently entrance to the museum
proper, will be restored as the entrance to the film center. And MoMA's
original "Bauhaus" staircase will once again become an integral
connection between the galleries.

Taniguchi's plan expands MoMA's present 86,000 square feet of gallery
space to 133,000 square feet. But additional design refinements are
expected in the coming months, according to MoMA director Glenn Lowry.
What's the expansion's pricetag? The museum isn't saying yet, but it
will "be less than the Getty," joked MoMA chairman Ronald Lauder at the
press conference, in reference to the $1-billion J. Paul Getty Center
opening this week in Los Angeles. When will it be finished? MoMA
professes similar uncertainty as to the exact date, but Lauder has
challenged Lowry to have it done in time for the museum's 75th
anniversary in 2004. "What's great about this plan, nobody can explain,"
said the architect Philip Johnson, who designed MoMA's first expansion
in 1951. "You will walk in and be smitten by art."

This project is Taniguchi's first in the U.S. He has done a number of
museums in Japan, including the Nagano Prefectural Museum (1990), the
Marugame Genichiro-Inokuma Museum (1988-81), the Toyota Municipal Museum
of Art (1991-95) and the Gallery of the Horyuji Treasures now under
construction at the Tokyo National Museum.

The two other finalists in MoMA's competition were Columbia University
architecture dean Bernard Tschumi and the Swiss architectural team of
Herzog and de Meuron. The museum's architect selection committee
consisted of MoMA trustee Sid Bass, who served as chairman, plus Lauder,
museum president Agnes Gund, MoMA chairman emeritus David Rockefeller,
Marshall Cogan and Jerry Spier.

WALTER ROBINSON is editor of ArtNet Magazine.

-------------------

May 5, 2004

The Modern's Cool New Box: Displaying Art, Not Fighting It

By SARAH BOXER

A digital image, looking east from the atrium's second floor in the
Modern's new building.

A digital image looking west at the building from the Sculpture Garden.

"This is not destination architecture," Glenn D. Lowry, the director of
the Museum of Modern Art, said, looking at his unfinished new building.
"It is a museum."

After seeing what a gleaming, eccentric museum like Frank Gehry's
Guggenheim could do for a city like Bilbao, Spain, every museum director
seemed poised to hire a signature architect, a Daniel Libeskind or a
Frank Gehry, to design a showpiece. Every museum, that is, but the
Museum of Modern Art. It has held fast to the cool white box.

"A museum is not architecture, and it is not a collection," Mr. Lowry
said. "It is both." A museum, in other words, should not compete with
its art.

The new Modern, by Yoshio Taniguchi, a Japanese architect who has never
before designed a building outside Japan, will more than double the
museum's gallery space and alter its configuration, lengthen the garden,
add an atrium and highlight contemporary art. Construction costs are
estimated at $425 million.

But one thing will not change. The building will be thoroughly modern. The
midtown Modern, scheduled to open in late November after being closed
for two and a half years, is 630,000 square feet of straight walls,
floors and ceilings with no obtrusive columns or dead-end hallways. It
is a building with "a harmonic precision," Mr. Lowry said.

But simple architecture is not always simple. Making a precise,
rectilinear museum in a city that refuses to bend very much requires
lots of logistical contortions. To cite a small example, the builders
had to cut a notch out of one of museum's facades to preserve the view
of St. Thomas Church from 54th Street. And in New York City many unions
are involved, each with its own schedule. That makes a precisionist
structure, where quarter-inch goofs can throw off the whole thing,
extremely tricky to build.

The museum looks far from finished. There are remnants of corn bread on
the stairs, girly pictures on the unfinished walls, salsa playing on
boom boxes, lighting being tested on Matisse posters, and plaster,
plywood, granite and graffiti everywhere. This is the time when you can
see everything that is going on under all those straight walls, windows
and floors to keep the surfaces smooth and pure.

The first and biggest obstacle to the Modern's seamlessness was the
54-story residential tower between the old and the new parts of the
museum. The goal was to allow visitors to pass from old to new without
ever knowing they had left the museum, Mr. Lowry said. But the tower,
with its 248 residents, could not be razed. So the Modern got permission
to "slice through the tower," Mr. Lowry said, "to penetrate the four
feet of concrete that supported the tower." To insure that the tower,
pierced by the Modern's passages and escalators, would not collapse,
steel braces had to be installed in the lower nine floors.

The new building's centerpiece is the second floor. The grand Zimbabwean
black granite stairway leads here from the garden level. This is where
the multistory atrium takes off. And this is the huge space for the
museum's permanent collection of contemporary art, a 20,000-square-foot
gallery that is strong enough and big enough to hold three Richard Serra
sculptures.

Mr. Lowry seemed particularly proud that this gallery and the sixth-floor
space for temporary exhibitions have no columns. To accomplish this, he
explained, engineers had to rig an armature above the eighth floor from
which to hang the lower floors.

"Maybe I'm jaded about the magic of all that," said Gregory Clement, the
managing principal architect with Kohn Pedersen Fox, the New York firm
that has been working with Mr. Taniguchi since the beginning. "It is one
of those things that is done all the time."

Mr. Clement seemed more excited to point out the small, often invisible
things that were done to realize Mr. Taniguchi's ideas. The new
building, he explained, not only looks minimalist but is, from top to
bottom, inside and out, conceptually and in the details.

Mr. Taniguchi's palette is minimalist, Mr. Clement explained: silver
anodized aluminum panels mark the entrances and cover the canopies over
the garden; a translucent milky-looking glass veils the older parts of
the Modern; and black granite and gray glass cover the new east and west
wings.

Another feature of Mr. Taniguchi's reductive aesthetic is that every turn
in the building is marked by a change in materials, so that it looks not
like a solid block but a series of monochromatic planes. Of course each
seemingly unitary plane is made up of many glass panes or stone slabs.
But in Mr. Taniguchi's plan the joints are minuscule.

Mr. Clement pointed to the black granite slabs that cover much of new
building. Most buildings, he said, would have 3/8 inch to 1 1/4 inches
of space between the slabs. That's what you need to allow for slight
variations in the way the stone panels are cut and installed and for
shifts under varying loads. "We got the joints down to one-quarter to
three-eighths inch," he said, by adding spandrel beams that take some of
the weight of the wall. (Spandrel beams connect the columns at the outer
edge of the structural frame.)

Mr. Lowry noted that Mr. Taniguchi was given few directives. One was to
keep the garden "exactly as it was." Another was to make sure the
building would be "suffused with light." Thus two huge windows, nearly
floor to ceiling, face each other at opposite ends of the Sculpture
Garden. Both are topped by anodized aluminum canopies. Both rise
straight up from the ground level to the sixth floor. And in this case,
Mr. Lowry noted, straight really does mean straight. "We designed it so
that the facade has zero-degree deflection. There's no bow."

Mr. Clement indicated that the real feat with the windows lay elsewhere.
The glass walls, he said, float free from the floor, appearing to be
autonomous planes. And to make things more challenging yet, Mr.
Taniguchi wanted the mullions between the panes of glass to be as slim
as possible, slimmer than the usual 3 1/2 to 4 inches. That meant that a
conventional aluminum system would not be strong enough. Steel mullions
had to be used.

The same rectilinear precision goes for the ceilings and walls of the
galleries. Although they are nothing but sheetrock with a plaster skin,
they had to be absolutely straight. Mr. Lowry pointed out a reveal
between a wall and doorway that narrowed toward the bottom. "This is not
acceptable," he said. He then showed how some ring-shaped fittings for
smoke detectors and sprinklers did not sit smoothly in the ceiling.
"Most people won't see this," he said, but cumulatively they will pick
up on it. Either it's "a quiet ceiling" or there's a disturbance.

Even the floors should feel quiet, Mr. Lowry said. Most of the gallery
floors are simple oak, but they hide a complex layering. At the bottom
is concrete. On top of that are sleepers, planks fitted with rubber
runners. On top of that is a grid of boards, stuffed with sound
insulation. Then there's a plywood base and finally the oak. The result:
"The floor has give to it," Mr. Lowry said. It's a quiet walk.

Given all this rectilinear rigor, it is odd that the museum has bent so
far on one point. It has given up the idea that the history of modern
art is a straight course, a simple, triumphant narrative. The old
building had one way into each gallery, Mr. Lowry said. The story the
museum told, he added, "was too reductive, too simple." So this time the
Modern decided to make its galleries porous. In other words, "there's
not a single linear route."

Although you can take what Mr. Lowry called the "synoptic route," which
begins with contemporary art on the second floor and moves back to the
earliest Modern Art on the fifth, you don't have to stay on the path. A
variety of stairs, escalators and elevators connects all the floors. "We
don't want people to feel they're on a train," Mr. Lowry said. "Art
history is not a linear process."

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

----------------

June 9, 2004

More Than Child's Play: Making Over the Modern

By CAROL VOGEL

Hope Cullinan of the Museum of Modern Art staff adjusts miniatures of
artworks on a model of the museum, which is being expanded and will
reopen in November.

In a windowless office in Queens, five curators are poring over an
18-foot-long model of the new painting and sculpture galleries at the
Museum of Modern Art's vastly expanded West 53rd Street home, which will
reopen in November. They are like children playing with a doll's house,
but instead of make-believe furniture, their toys are the greatest
collection of modern art in the world. Ever so delicately, tiny
reproductions of "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" by Picasso, "The Dance" by
Matisse and "Flag" by Jasper Johns have been taped to the walls.

There are also miniature sculptures by Judd and Flavin and even Claes
Oldenburg's whimsical giant ice-cream cone reduced to the size of a
thumb. As the curators work, some of the sculptures are accidentally
knocked over in the process of rehanging some of the paintings — faces
cringe. What looks like a game is actually serious work.

"The last chapter of the story is always the most difficult," said John
Elderfield, the Modern's chief curator of painting and sculpture, who
has been reluctant to reveal his plans for reinstalling the collection.
"You have to think what to leave people with."

It is a daunting task: to use the museum's vast collection to tell the
history of modern art in new and unfamiliar galleries.

Not only has the museum's collection grown and changed enormously since
the institution's founding in 1929, but so has the way that people look
at art.

"We're talking to a younger and in many ways better-educated audience but
one that is not necessarily more sophisticated," said Glenn D. Lowry,
the Museum of Modern Art's director. "We're trying to lay out the
history of the Modern while recognizing that it's a provisional history,
one that has not been fully written and one that will continue to change
and evolve."

The museum is also playing to a far larger audience, one that has nearly
doubled over the last 10 years.

Mr. Lowry and his curatorial team have been grappling with the challenge
of creating a new Modern since 1996 when the museum bought the
neighboring Dorset Hotel along with two adjacent brownstones and
embarked on an $858 million renovation and expansion.

Designed by the Japanese architect Yoshi Taniguchi, the new museum is an
elegantly minimal building of black granite, dark gray, clear and etched
glass with about 63,000 square feet of new and renovated spaces on six
floors. The exhibition space alone has grown to 125,000 square feet from
85,000 square feet with galleries clustered around a soaring
110-foot-tall atrium.

And what will go where in those galleries? While the curators have a
general idea of how they want the galleries to look, none will discuss
specifics, saying that until they get the art into the new space they
cannot tell exactly what will go where. But some logical chronologies
will occur, they say, beginning with seminal late 19th-century and early
20th-century paintings like "The Bather" by Cezanne (1885) and "The
Starry Night" by van Gogh (1893) straight through to more contemporary
work from Rachel Whiteread, Takashi Murakami and Damien Hirst.

The design of the new galleries, the curators say, gives visitors the
option of following the collection historically or picking specific
sections that will be able to stand on their own.

What visitors will see when the museum opens to the public on Nov. 20, Mr.
Lowry said, is simply one installation that will be constantly evolving.
Unlike the collection of any other museum of modern art in the world,
the Modern's is so rich that it has the option of being able to give
artists from Gorky through Warhol and Lichtenstein miniretrospectives if
the curators so choose.

Over the years its installations have tended to reflect the eye of one
curator, most notably Alfred H. Barr Jr., the legendary founding
director of the museum. But this time, while the painting and sculpture
galleries will ultimately reflect the sensibility of Mr. Elderfield, he
has worked closely with his team. When he was named the museum's chief
curator for painting and sculpture last year, Mr. Elderfield hired
Joachim Pissarro, who had been the curator of European and contemporary
art at the Yale University Art Gallery, and Ann Temkin, who had been the
curator of contemporary art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. They
joined Anne Umland, a senior curator, and Elizabeth Levine, the
department's curatorial manager. At first each curator was given an area
to work on. Now as the opening nears, the group is collaborating,
gallery by gallery, using the model as inspiration.

"I felt strongly that each gallery should have a subject," Mr. Elderfield
said. "I want each gallery to have a kind of integrity so that if it
were taken out of the museum and plunked into the middle of Central
Park, it would be a viable show on its own." He declined to give
specifics.

But now rather than giving certain artists their own galleries, he said,
they will be more integrated. Mondrian, for instance, always hung by
himself. His paintings will now join other abstract artists who will
rotate over time.

Another significant change is that the sequence of galleries is being
reversed so that contemporary art is the first thing people will see.
The space on the second floor, 15,000 square feet of giant,
uninterrupted spaces with nearly 21-foot-high ceilings and no columns,
can easily accommodate monumental, multiton sculptures.

The combination of the building's modern architecture and the contemporary
art within it sends an intentional message: this is the place to come to
see art of the new. (It was also a practical decision since oversize
sculptures can be installed from the street by crane, which would be
impossible with the higher floors.)

Mr. Lowry admitted that the museum was bowing to popular taste. "The
interest in contemporary art has been growing since the 1970's," he
said. "It has become intense today. An increasingly large number of
visitors come specifically to see contemporary art. We hope to engage
their curiosity about the past."

And so in much the same way that department stores purposely put their
most salable merchandise on the top floor, forcing shoppers to go
through the entire building to get it, visitors to the new Modern will
have to go to the fifth floor to see the early masterpieces of modern
art.

Dealing with the world after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has also
changed the way the curators think, Mr. Lowry said. Before 9/11, 40
percent to 50 percent of visitors were foreign. Today about 80 percent
are American. "That's a huge demographic shift," Mr. Lowry said, one
that will not necessarily alter the nature of installations but that
will change the kind of educational materials the museum provides.

"One would be foolish not to assume that we live in a moment that is
highly charged and certain images take on a new meaning," Mr. Lowry
continued. "Immediately after 9/11, Jasper Johns's "Flag" paintings
suddenly acquired a newfound resonance despite the fact that it was not
intentional or necessarily desired on the part of the artist. Yet we
cannot avoid these references and don't want to."

Then there is the changing nature of art. Over the years the lines have
been blurred between painting, drawing, photography, film and video. The
permanent galleries will do much more to mix these mediums. There will
be paintings by Warhol in the photography galleries and Expressionist
prints in the painting's galleries. Photographs will also show up in the
second-floor contemporary art galleries.

But perhaps the biggest dilemma is how to tell the story of art of the
last 30 years. "It's not a definitive account," Mr. Elderfield said.
But, he stressed, by the time visitors reach the last room they will
have traveled in time from the 1880's to the present.

"I would hope that people get the message that art from all periods is
somehow connected," he said. "That the sequence of art, while
drastically different, also relates very powerfully to one another."

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
----------------

June 17, 2004

The Danes Rule at the Modern Museum

By MICHAEL Z. WISE

FAMILIAR Arne Jacobsen's Series 7 chair.

HOT AND MODERN A Georg Jensen coffeepot.

THE Swedish home furnishings giant Ikea had an advertisement that declared
of America: "It's a big country. Someone's got to furnish it." Now that
the big, newly refurbished Museum of Modern Art is nearing completion,
the Danes are furnishing it. The Danish government has persuaded the
museum to use Danish furnishings for almost all the public areas of its
expanded quarters — a triumph of trade policy and product placement.

When last seen, the museum had custom-made wooden benches and a mix of
other furnishings, only one of of which will make a return engagement:
the Bertoia wire chairs in the sculpture garden designed for Knoll in
the 1950's.

"There was no attempt at a kind of uniform all-over effort," said Terence
Riley, chief architecture and design curator at the museum.

When the museum reopens, on Nov. 20, the pieces will be unified by source:
Denmark. Works by 33 Danish designers, including Arne Jacobsen and Hans
Wegner, will be used in the lobby, the cafe and the cafeteria, among
other places. The furnishings have a retail value of several million
dollars.

The benches by Poul Kjaerholm upholstered in black leather in the
galleries and foyers will be Danish, and so will the Georg Jensen
coffeepots, the Erik Bagger wine goblets, the Rosendahl candleholders,
the Jensen flatware and the Royal Copenhagen china in the restaurant.
Some 150 articles are being supplied at a discount by 13 Danish
manufacturers and paid for by the Danish government and Danish
foundations.

"In some ways I think it's completely excellent, and in some ways I'm just
shocked that it's completely Danish," said Zesty Meyers, an owner of R
20th Century, a New York gallery that specializes in vintage design.
"That just makes no sense to me, because good design is from all over
the world."

The only non-Danish items in the public areas, aside from the Bertoia
chairs, will be narrow Knoll benches in some galleries. Four of the
Danish objects are already in the permanent collection, including
Jacobsen's popular Series 7 chair from 1955, and half of the designers
are otherwise represented in the permanent collection.

The agreement with the Danish government was announced last week at a
preview of the museum's vastly expanded premises. "The Italians are
going to go nuts, and so will the Swedes," said Irene Krarup, the Danish
cultural attaché who helped arrange the deal.

"I am somewhat envious," Olle Wastberg, the Swedish consul general in New
York, said mildly. "We wish we could have done it. The Danes are to be
congratulated."

Officials at the museum stress that all the objects underwent curatorial
vetting. Although the museum also considered using furnishings by
American and Italian makers, the Danes succeeded with their package
deal. "It would have been rather churlish to go around the Danes and
shop for a better deal," Mr. Riley said, "when the fact is that they had
the initiative, and they had the goods."

The Danes also had an advantage in that the approach to the museum was
made by their government, not by individuals. "We could have filled the
whole museum with American design, but there's no one person you could
talk to," Mr. Riley said.

Negotiations got under way in September 2002, when the Danes offered to
sponsor furniture and accessories in the public areas. Once the museum
decided that 95 percent of the furnishings would be Danish, the Danish
government made its offer of a gift. "The curators went on a shopping
spree," said Michael Metz Morch, the Danish consul general in New York.

Paola Antonelli, a design curator at the museum, went to Denmark this year
to look over more than 300 products, including prototypes. The
furnishings she selected were shipped to New York, where other curators
tried them out, along with trustees; Ronald S. Lauder, the chairman of
the museum; and Glenn D. Lowry, the director. The new furnishings will
complement the clean-lined architecture and restrained color palette of
Yoshio Taniguchi's new building, Mr. Riley said.

New tableware selected for the museum will go on sale at its design store
in August, along with a few furniture pieces. The Danes will be
acknowledged on a plaque in the museum.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

--------------------

September 21, 2003

The Modern's Other Renovation

By ANDREW BLUM

Why is the logo on top "digital," "soulless" and downright "hideous,"
while the logo on bottom shows "character," "warmth" and a "profound
respect for the past?"

ON vacation in Greensboro, Vt., in the summer of 1966, Alfred H. Barr, the
Museum of Modern Art's first director, had an epiphany. The museum's
official abbreviation — long "MOMA" — would, Barr thought, be better
served by a lowercase "o": "MoMA." In letters sent from the city, his
colleagues took issue with his holiday musings; "it gives me terrible
visual hiccoughs," one wrote.

The hiccoughs apparently took decades to subside. It wasn't until the
mid-80's that the museum deemed "MoMA" proper enough for use in member
communications, and another decade passed before the acronym appeared on
banners outside the museum. Today, the museum recognizes that most
people identify it by the word "MoMA" — not just the sound of the
acronym, but also its look. "That lowercase `o' trapped between those
two M's creates a unique word-shape that is translinguistic," Ed Pusz,
director of the museum's graphic design department says. "It's
accessible to people who don't speak the language."

So it's with a sense of great care that the museum's leaders introduce
their latest innovation: a redesigned MoMA logo, a newly scrubbed face
by which the revered institution will soon present itself to the world
on signs, coffee mugs and subway ads, and throughout the Yoshio
Taniguchi-designed expansion and renovation planned to open near the end
of 2004. As befits a change of such import, the redesign was undertaken
with much attention: the museum hired perhaps the world's foremost
typographer, paid him in the low five figures and spent eight months
scrutinizing every tiny step in the process.

The outcome? Well, it's subtle.

You would have to look rather closely to see it. Extremely closely. In
fact, someone could set the old logo and the new logo side by side and
stare for some time before detecting even the slightest distinction. The
folks who led the exhaustive makeover process couldn't be more pleased.

As might be expected of some of the most visually aware people in the
world, those who have worked on the the Modern's typefaces have a
remarkable history of typographic self-scrutiny. In 1964, the museum
replaced its geometric letterforms typical of the Bauhaus and German
modernism with Franklin Gothic No. 2, one of the grandest and most
familiar of American typefaces. Designed in 1902 by Morris Fuller Benton
in Jersey City, Franklin is simultaneously muscular, with an imposing
weight, and humanist, with letterforms reminiscent of the strokes of the
calligrapher's pen rather than a mechanical compass. "Quite simply, it's
a face that's modern with roots," Ivan Chermayeff, the designer who made
the selection for the museum, recalled recently. "It has some character,
and therefore some warmth about it, and some sense of the hand — i.e.,
the artist. All of which seemed to me to make a lot of sense for the
Museum of Modern Art, which is not only looking to the future but also
looking to the past."

Mr. Chermayeff's logic held up. Aside from what Mr. Pusz calls a "blip"
around the time the museum's expansion opened in 1984, the museum has
used Franklin consistently for nearly 40 years. So when the Modern asked
the Toronto-based designer Bruce Mau to explore a range of possibilities
for the new building's signage — including rounder, more symmetrical
typefaces — he felt strongly that Franklin should be left alone.
"Everybody gets tired of their own voice," Mr. Mau said from his studio
in Toronto, "and so they want to change it. But I was like: `Don't mess
with it! It's an extraordinary landmark identity: don't throw the baby
out with the bathwater.' "

The museum's director, Glen Lowry, agreed. "We looked at all sorts of
options, and said, `You know, we don't need to go there.' Our self-image
hasn't shifted so dramatically that our identity needs to be expressed
in an utterly new way. We don't need to go from chintz to stripes."

But Mr. Mau noticed that the Franklin the museum was using didn't seem to
him like Franklin at all. Somewhere in the process of its evolution from
Benton's original metal type to the readily available digital one it had
lost some of its spirit, becoming "a hybrid digital soulless version,"
in Mr. Pusz's words. Metal type traditionally has slight variations
between point sizes, to compensate for the properties of ink and
differences in proportion. But digital versions of historic typefaces
are often created from metal originals of a single point size — as was
the case with the commercially available Franklin. It had been digitized
from metal type of a small size, distending the proportions at its
larger sizes. Once its defects were recognized, they became glaring: the
letters were squat and paunchy, sapping all the elegance out of the
white space between them. With some of the signage applications in the
new building requiring type four feet tall, the small variations became
"hideous," Mr. Pusz said.

The museum approached the pre-eminent typographer Matthew Carter about
"refreshing" the typeface. On the Mac in his third-floor walk-up
apartment in Cambridge, Mass., Mr. Carter has designed many of the
letterforms we swallow daily in unthinking gulps — among them typefaces
for National Geographic, Sports Illustrated and The Washington Post, as
well as Bell Centennial, used in phone books, and Verdana, the Microsoft
screen font. Trained originally as a type founder — the person who
forges type from hot metal — Mr. Carter pioneered typography's
transition to computer-based desktop publishing in the 1980's when he
helped found Bitstream, the first digital type foundry. He was one of
the first to embrace the idea that type no longer necessarily began with
metal forms and ended as an impression on paper; it could be designed,
implemented and read without ever escaping the confines of the computer
screen.

Refreshing Franklin was, Mr. Carter said, "like asking an architect to
design an exact replica of a building." But it was a job he was happy to
do: "That opportunity to really study these letterforms and capture them
as faithfully as I could was sort of an education to me."

His task was aided by eight trays of metal type of Franklin Gothic No. 2
that had surfaced not long before in the Modern's basement. Not knowing
at the time what he would do with them, Mr. Pusz wheeled the trays one
by one on a desk chair down the block to his temporary office on the
Avenue of the Americas. Mr. Carter scanned printed samples from the
trays, and using a software program called Fontographer, began the long
process of plotting the curve points for each letter — a task requiring
the full extent of his long-learned craft. He also had to invent the
variety of characters typical of modern fonts that didn't exist in the
metal — currency signs and accents, for example. The resulting typeface
— two slight variations, actually, one for signage and one for text —
are now being tested on mockups by the Modern's graphic design
department to see how they look in different sizes and forms, and, after
yet more tweaking, will soon be installed on computers across the
museum.

But will anyone notice? "I suspect that if we're really successful the
public won't really notice the difference, it will just feel right," Mr.
Lowry said. Even if this is a carefully calculated exercise in branding,
at least it's true (nearly comically so) to the mission of the museum:
less MoMA Inc. than a bunch of aesthetes staring at the shape of their
own name until their eyes cross. Perhaps in the sharpened interstices of
the "m" or the slightly more pinched ellipse of the "o" there might
exist a statement of what the Modern wants to be — you just have to
squint to see it. "I think that's really at the heart of the
institution's premise, which is a deep and profound respect for the
past, and an absolute willingness to engage the present — and a
recognition that they're not mutually exclusive," Mr. Lowry said.

No, but sometimes they do look pretty similar.

Andrew Blum is a frequent contributor to Metropolis.

Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

--------------

New York's great modern museum is reborn, thanks to $425 million and an
unlikely architect named Taniguchi
By Cathleen McGuigan
Newsweek

Oct. 11 issue - Early one evening last spring, on the edge of the Inland
Sea in Japan, architect Yoshio Taniguchi was showing off the
construction site of a small museum he'd designed. Taniguchi, 67, is
silver-haired and tall (too tall to buy Japanese menswear) and, like his
serene modernist buildings, has an air of elegance and calm. "A lot of
architects design a lot of details," Taniguchi was saying. "I try to
conceal details." His brand of modernism doesn't always express its
structure; instead, his buildings tend to have a lightness of being,
defying the steel, glass, concrete and stone it took to make them. Their
exquisite craftsmanship is legendary, and Japanese contractors are proud
to oblige him. "In Japan, Taniguchi walks on clouds," says Brian Aamoth,
an American architect who's worked with him there. Later, ordering
drinks before dinner, Taniguchi talked about how different building
methods are in America. But he never really answered the question of why
such a famous architect at home had taken so long to design outside
Japan. "You are psychoanalyzing me," he said with a slight smile. Then
his cocktail arrived. It was a Manhattan.

When Taniguchi was chosen to design the new, vastly expanded Museum of
Modern Art seven years ago, a lot of people in the art world scratched
their heads. Out of 10 architects invited to compete for this prize
commission (all were under 60—MoMA had ruled out the generation of Frank
Gehry), Taniguchi was virtually unknown in America, and his scheme for
MoMA's midtown Manhattan site seemed so smooth and corporate—so
unfashionably tame—it looked like a long shot next to the provocative
concepts of such hotshots as Rem Koolhaas and Herzog & de Meuron. Even
Taniguchi didn't think he'd win. Convinced he'd fatally fumbled his key
presentation to MoMA's trustees, he headed straight to a neighborhood
bar to mourn.

Next month, after nearly four years of construction, MoMA will finally
open the doors of his quietly elegant modernist building. The stakes are
high—the building alone cost $425 million—and the debate that began with
Taniguchi's selection isn't entirely over. It goes to the heart of the
museum's identity and signals a shift in contemporary architecture.
After years of eye-popping museum design (most famously Gehry's
gorgeously curvy Guggenheim Bilbao), Taniguchi's self-effacing building
rejects the status of icon, as if to murmur, "Don't mind me—just look at
the art." After all, the art is the richest collection of modern
masterworks in the world, from Monet's "Water Lilies" to Picasso's "Les
Demoiselles d'Avignon" to Andy Warhol's soup cans. Some of MoMA's devout
followers believed the museum—the first to create a department of
architecture—betrayed its mission by building Taniguchi's scheme rather
than something jazzier. But MoMA, 75 years old and hardly a haven for
the avant-garde, makes no apology. "It's like having an English suit or
an Italian suit," says museum director Glenn Lowry. "Yoshio's building
is the English suit—it's not flamboyant but it's perfectly tailored and
will be the same in 100 years as it is today."

Taniguchi likes to say his goal is to make the architecture "disappear."
And while we don't believe him literally—his ego is fiercely invested in
his design principles and his impeccable details—his understated
approach at MoMA is to subtly and meticulously create experiences of
shifting spaces, light and views as you move through the museum. He
started with a homage, restoring the facades of the original 1939 museum
by Philip Goodwin and Edward Durell Stone and Philip Johnson's 1964 east
wing. He then turned his focus to the famous sculpture garden—"the heart
of the museum," he says—and framed it with immaculately cool
glass-curtain walls and deep, porchlike overhangs. Then, inside the
museum, Taniguchi, in his quiet way, went to town: his new entrance cuts
a wide public passage through the city block. From there, you cross a
spacious ticket lobby and wham!—you're standing in a gorgeous
110-foot-high atrium, flooded with daylight, looking out at that garden.
A wide stairway of green slate—or the escalators tucked in beyond—take
you up to the art.

The galleries (now covering 125,000 square feet, up from 85,000 in the old
building) are classic white boxes, but they vary in size from large to
larger, and are arranged so the visitor can wander at will, rather than
being force-marched in one direction. On the second floor, one
spectacular gallery sprawls 200 feet without columns—a triumph of
engineering and a manifestation of MoMA's new commitment to show
large-scale contemporary art, like Richard Serra's sculptures. But the
best thing about Taniguchi's scheme may be its urbanity. Not only has he
neatly knit his complex design into the tight city site but he gives you
frequent glimpses of the street and neighboring rooftops from windowed
galleries or the atrium's balconies. His museum is meant to mediate
between the chaos of New York and the contemplation of art.

Taniguchi has had a lifelong relationship with Western modernism. His
father was an early modern architect in Tokyo, and he remembers the
impact of "a very colorful culture" brought by American GIs to Japan
after the gray war years: "Lucky Strikes, Coca-Cola, Life magazine,
Blondie and Superman!" At 21, Taniguchi went to Harvard's Graduate
School of Design, the bastion of the Bauhaus, and then worked for Kenzo
Tange, who was Japan's foremost modern architect. During those years, he
spent time in New York and of course visited the Museum of Modern Art.
"I was more interested in the people than the paintings," he recalls. "I
liked watching how they looked at the art and how they moved."

If you go to any of Taniguchi's museums in Japan, you begin to appreciate
how MoMA's architect-selection committee must have felt when they first
saw his work, as they toured Asia and Europe in trustee Ronald Lauder's
private jet. The buildings are incredibly seductive—monumental but
spare, with surprising shifts in scale—and beautifully crafted. Take the
exquisite Gallery of Horyuji Treasures in Tokyo (1999), a structure of
delicacy and strength, with a screen of slender steel louvers masking a
soaring glass facade. To approach, you walk on water—across a bridge
that just clears a tranquil pool. But to get inside, you have to make a
little turn and go through a small, low-ceilinged vestibule—meant to
suggest the entrance to a traditional tea ceremony, where you humble
yourself by ducking through a small opening. Along with his rigorous
passion for modernism, and the influence of such masters as Mies van der
Rohe, Taniguchi's buildings are inevitably suffused with Japanese
culture.

Taniguchi had big budgets during Japan's boom years in the '80s and '90s:
the Horyuji gallery cost twice per square foot what MoMA did, and you
can see every yen. Many wondered how the perfection of Taniguchi's
design details could be replicated in the United States. As it happens,
the supervision and much of the detailing of MoMA was put into the hands
of a big New York firm, Kohn Pedersen Fox. Last June, Taniguchi toured
the MoMA construction site for the first time in months. "In Japan, I
design everything, even the door handles," he said. "I'll be honest with
you, many details here are different from mine. But the concept I
proposed is here." And Taniguchi got his way on key elements. Check out
those glass-curtain walls surrounding the garden. The panes are huge
(read: expensive) and the mullions are solid steel but very thin (read:
superexpensive). The effect is beautifully crisp. "Yoshio won many
battles through sheer obstinacy," says Terence Riley, chief curator of
architecture. "He would explain so well why something had to be just
so—and sometimes he would win by simply a long silence."

The first building that the Museum of Modern Art put up for itself, in
1939, wasn’t sumptuous, like the Met, or extravagantly sculptural, like
the Guggenheim, two decades later. It was a crisp, blunt box. Philip L.
Goodwin and Edward Durell Stone’s International Style architecture was
defiantly austere—a retort to the idea that museums should resemble
grandiose palaces. The white marble building burst out of a row of
genteel brownstones on West Fifty-third Street, forcing its way into the
Manhattan cityscape. It was a matter of pride that the new building
looked nothing like its neighbors.

The museum’s idiosyncratic appearance was always a bit of a pose, however.
Though the building’s original design emphasized its difference from the
old architecture around it, the ultimate goal of the Modern’s curators
was to make all the old stuff go away. In 1951, a new wing by Philip
Johnson was built along the museum’s western edge, and in 1964 another,
larger Johnson addition appeared on its eastern flank. The Modern grew
again in 1984, with a new section by Cesar Pelli, who also designed a
companion fifty-two-story apartment tower. And with the opening, this
month, of the largest expansion yet, a
four-hundred-and-twenty-five-million-dollar addition and renovation by
the Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi, the Modern has pretty much
taken over the block. The museum stretches along Fifty-third Street from
just west of Fifth Avenue to just short of Sixth, and it reaches north
to cover most of Fifty-fourth Street, too. You couldn’t ask for a
clearer symbol of how modernism has moved from the cultural fringe to
the mainstream. Not only has it been years since the art at the Modern
has challenged anyone—its Matisses and Pollocks are beloved by all—but
Taniguchi’s strict geometries of stone and glass feel as conventional as
a Doric colonnade.

When the Goodwin and Stone building opened, Lewis Mumford wrote that “it
possesses, to a degree not dreamed of even by the designers of
Rockefeller Center, the luxury of space.” But it wasn’t particularly
big; it was barely larger than the neighboring brownstones. Arthur
Drexler, who headed the architecture-and-design department for decades,
liked to observe that until the 1984 expansion you could fit the entire
Museum of Modern Art into the Great Hall of the Met. The Modern didn’t
have any enormous galleries, and most of its exhibition spaces were
domestic in scale. In fact, the affection that many people felt for the
museum was formed by the experience of seeing paintings in fairly small,
low-ceilinged white rooms.

The 1984 expansion was an attempt to make the museum bigger without
changing its basic qualities, and it didn’t work very well. The
galleries got somewhat larger and there were many more of them, this
time connected by a prominent set of escalators—yet the place felt
unnaturally attenuated, like a stretch limousine. The general feeling
about the expansion was summed up by Kirk Varnedoe, the chief curator of
painting and sculpture, who said, “We squeezed the last juice you could
get out of that model and maybe killed it in the process.” In 1996, when
Varnedoe made that remark, it was clear that if the Modern was to grow
again it would have to break from small, white rooms and neutral,
International Style architecture. Ronald Lauder, the museum’s chairman,
reinforced this idea, saying that, as far as the trustees were
concerned, the architecture should be “as exciting as possible.”

That isn’t what happened. The Modern talked to dozens of architects,
including Rem Koolhaas, Bernard Tschumi, Jacques Herzog and Pierre de
Meuron, and Steven Holl, as well as Taniguchi, and it commissioned
casual studies from ten architects and then more detailed plans from
three. In 1997, the museum snubbed the radicals and hired Taniguchi, who
represents not the cutting edge of architecture but, rather, a carefully
wrought, highly refined modernism—a cool and reserved aesthetic that has
more in common with the Modern’s original credo than with the expressive
direction of recent architecture and museum design.

The decision, I suspect, was based in part on disappointment with the
avant-garde architects’ proposals but mostly on the realization that the
Modern is fundamentally a conservative institution. The choice of
Taniguchi wasn’t so much a failure of nerve as a moment of institutional
self-knowledge. This museum wouldn’t have wanted Bilbao if Frank Gehry
had done it for nothing. The Modern has supported, collected, and
celebrated architectural design more than any other museum in America,
but it has never allowed its identity to be defined by any architecture
of its own. It is one thing to display Frank Lloyd Wright models inside
your galleries; it is quite another to have Rem Koolhaas design your
building. The Modern chose Taniguchi, a sixty-seven-year-old architect
who was educated at Harvard but has done almost all of his professional
work in Japan, because it thought that he could best preserve the
museum’s DNA.

That doesn’t explain why Taniguchi’s new Modern is as good as it is.
Taniguchi clearly understood a paradox that underscores this
project—that his success at keeping the museum the same would come, in
part, from his ability to recognize how much had to change. His Modern
was going to be nearly twice the size of the previous one, and he knew
better than to simply distend the old spaces. With its sleek glass walls
and sharp, rectilinear lines, Taniguchi’s huge building superficially
resembles the Modern of old, but in many ways it represents a greater
change than the oddly shaped buildings proposed by some architects the
museum considered, like Herzog and de Meuron, who suggested adding a
prismatic glass tower, but would have left the museum’s most celebrated
paintings in the old Goodwin and Stone galleries.

Although Taniguchi has created some superb display spaces, his design is
most splendid, and subtle, in its urbanism. Until now, the Modern has
had an unresolved, almost hesitant relationship with midtown Manhattan.
When the benign tension between the 1939 building and the old houses
disappeared, nothing replaced it. The museum didn’t feel connected to
the city, except in the sculpture garden. When the Modern bought and
demolished the Dorset Hotel, on Fifty-fourth Street, along with numerous
small brownstones, its site grew not only bigger but also more complex,
and Taniguchi saw this as a chance to weave the building into the fabric
of the city. He gave it a new entrance, on Fifty-fourth Street, and he
provided a public passageway through the block to Fifty-third Street, a
huge lobby that anyone can use as a shortcut through a busy section of
midtown. The museum now faces both streets, and it has finally become
part of the connective tissue of Manhattan. The old Modern occupied the
street in sullen isolation; this one dances with its neighbors.
Taniguchi even sliced away a bit of his building in the southeast corner
of the garden, where it might have blocked a portion of St. Thomas
Church, which adjoins the museum to the east. On the inside, he has set
skylights on the top floor, right against the base of Pelli’s tower,
creating dazzling views right up its side toward the sky.

Taniguchi’s façade of absolute black granite, aluminum panels, and white
and gray glass is elegantly restrained. It proves that you can ensconce
a building within a kind of classic modern tradition and still imbue it
with freshness. And the design works on a large scale—so well that
Pelli’s apartment tower, which always seemed too big, now feels like a
natural part of a composition. It is balanced by a new, smaller tower at
the west end of the site, which houses the museum’s offices, and by two
monumental, portico-like gateways at the east and west ends of the
sculpture garden. Those porticoes, which resemble gigantic bookends,
frame the garden from inside the building, and from the outside they
ennoble the transition between the garden and the museum. The sculpture
garden has been restored to its original Philip Johnson design (Pelli
encroached on it with a greenhouselike structure containing escalators),
but the new surroundings that Taniguchi has made for it give the garden
a greater intensity.

The interior is a little less reserved than the outside, but not much. The
new lobby offers glimpses up to a six-story skylit atrium that cuts
through the new gallery floors, Taniguchi’s acknowledgment that a
building this big needs vertical as well as horizontal space. The atrium
contains precisely positioned openings, projections, balconies, and
overlooks; it is a pristine exercise in proportion, scale, and light,
not the kind of razzle-dazzle hotel architecture that the word “atrium”
calls to mind.

Once inside the museum, visitors follow a sequence that is quite different
from that of the old Modern: contemporary art is shown mainly in a set
of large, double-height galleries on the second floor, and you move
backward in time as you rise through the building and the ceilings get
lower. The famous paintings that once hung on the second floor are now
on the fifth, in rooms that are only slightly larger than the old ones.
At the top of the gallery wing, on the sixth floor, are grand, loftlike
galleries for temporary exhibitions.

The main difference is that there is no longer a single sequence of
movement, as there famously was at the Modern: one route through
obsessively linear galleries that presented the history of art as a
straight shot from Cézanne to Picasso to Matisse. The Modern’s singular
view of art history came, over time, to take on the stature of myth, and
these days politically correct critics call it into question, but the
fact is that the gallery scheme was as much a result of physical
limitations as of curators’ sensibilities. In the narrow confines of the
old Modern, there wasn’t really room to arrange things any other way.
Now, though, the building is vast, and its galleries aren’t episodes in
a narrative but hyperlinks, offering connections in multiple directions.
Terence Riley, the head of the museum’s department of architecture and
design, refers to the layout as resembling the child’s game Chutes and
Ladders—you can move straight through, or you can slip down a stairway
or up an escalator and find yourself in an entirely different moment in
the history of art. This approach is more liberating than confusing,
because the basic order of the building is always apparent; this museum
is not a structure that, like the Met, rambles so much that you get lost
in it.

Some of the most pleasant aspects of the design are in the details: a
magnificent cantilevered staircase of wood and metal between the fourth
and fifth floors is an expert homage to Mies van der Rohe. Taniguchi
makes a complex array of balconies, bridges, porticoes, stairs,
openings, vistas, and passageways seem serene rather than hyperactive.
The building won’t feel busy enough for people weaned on the non-stop
stimulation of a lot of today’s architecture, and it won’t feel modest
enough for people who insist that God meant the Museum of Modern Art to
be small. But I suspect that it will please almost everybody else.

The architect has also restored the façade of the original Goodwin and
Stone building, whose Thermolux translucent panels were covered up long
ago to provide more hanging space. The restoration is exquisite, and it
is both uplifting and saddening. The old building looks better than it
has in half a century, both inside and out. But it has been spiffed up
like a grande dame who has been dressed to be put on display at her
grandchild’s party. When you look at the old building from Fifty-third
Street, it seems almost embalmed—a beautiful relic trapped inside a
sprawling temple.
------------------------

INVISIBLE CATHEDRAL

by JOHN UPDIKE

A walk through the new Modern.

Issue of 2004-11-15
Posted 2004-11-08

Times Square has been sanitized and skyscraperized; the subway cars are
brightly lit inside and graffiti-free inside and out. New York is going
pristine. It is not easy, while gingerly stepping over loose floorboards
and extension cords as thick as boa constrictors, to picture the new
Museum of Modern Art in every tidy and clean-swept detail, but enough
was on view last month to persuade this visitor that the final effect
will be immaculate, rectilinear, capacious, and chaste. Whether or not
more could be asked of a museum, of a modern museum, I don’t know. The
white interiors, chamber upon chamber, some already hung with old
friends from moma’s collection and some as bare as a freshly plastered
storage closet, gave, a few weeks shy of their unveiling to the public,
the impression of a condition delicately balanced between presence and
absence. The architect, Yoshio Taniguchi, is Japanese, and a riddling
Zen reticence presided over the acres of white wall and white-oak floor,
the countless beady little halogen spotlights on their discreetly
recessed tracks, the sheets of light-filtering “fritted” glass with
their tiny pale strips of baked-in ceramic, and the hushed escalators,
whose oily works, not yet functional, were exposed to view and to the
ministrations of workmen. Looking into these gears laid bare put me in
mind, nostalgically, of the early Giacometti sculpture, “Woman with Her
Throat Cut,” that used to lie on a low pedestal on the second floor, and
of Arnaldo Pomodoro’s great bronze ball, its polished skin partially
flayed, that for a time sat in the old lobby.

Nothing in the new building is obtrusive, nothing is cheap. It feels
breathless with unspared expense. It has the enchantment of a bank after
hours, of a honeycomb emptied of honey and flooded with a soft glow. My
guide, William J. Maloney, the genial project director, quoted the
architect as saying to the museum trustees something like this: “Raise a
lot of money for me, I’ll give you good architecture. Raise even more
money, I’ll make the architecture disappear.” And disappear, in a way,
it has. The customary sensations that buildings give us—of secure
enclosure, of masses of matter firmly supported—are diluted by a black
gap, a mere quarter inch wide, that runs along the bottom and top of
every interior wall, and even at the base of weight-bearing pillars, so
that everything, subtly, floats. The gaps are useful for heat and
air-conditioning, too, but their aesthetic accomplishment is to
dematerialize the walls; the visitor moves through spaces demarcated as
if by Japanese paper screens. As he moves, artfully arranged glimpses
out into the city and across a dizzying, hundred-and-ten-foot-tall
atrium orient him and vary his view. Maloney spoke again for the
architect: “He didn’t want a box that could be anywhere. He said, ‘I
want the people to know they are in New York City.’” North-facing
windows frame segments, like Hopper paintings, of the handsome
brownstones along West Fifty-fourth Street. On the sixth floor, the top,
a wide skylight provides an alarming upward perspective of Cesar Pelli’s
fifty-two-story residential tower, erected in 1984 on museum land to one
side of the existing museum and now more or less in its center. “Can you
imagine,” Maloney asked, “we had to build this with that hanging over
us?” He allowed that the tower’s inhabitants had complained of a few
jolts and shudders in the three years of construction beneath their
feet. But no harm seems to have been done. Engineering miracles are an
everyday occurrence in Manhattan.

The museum has expanded a number of times since its opening day, on
November 8, 1929, in a rented space on the twelfth floor of the
Heckscher Building, at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Fifty-seventh
Street. In spite of the stock-market crash in progress, the exhibit was
so well attended that the building’s other tenants had to fight crowds
at the elevators. The seven improvised galleries showed four painters
now classified as Post-Impressionist; the Boston Transcript
sarcastically put it, “Thursday the newly created Museum of Modern Art
opened the doors of its temporary galleries and held a house-warming.
The invited guests, besides the usual group of socially elect, were
Cézanne, Gauguin, Seurat, and Van Gogh.” The latter, in fact, attended
in force—thirty-five Cézannes, twentysix Gauguins, seventeen Seurats,
and twenty-seven van Goghs. In 1932, the thriving museum moved to a
five-story town house, owned by John D. Rockefeller, Jr., at 11 West
Fifty-third Street, which is still its address. A boxy structure
designed as a museum in the International Style by Philip L. Goodwin and
Edward Durell Stone replaced it in 1939; this building was added onto in
1951, 1964, and 1984.

West Fifty-third and Fifty-fourth Streets were residential neighborhoods,
with back yards and access alleys; therefore museum expansion, except
for the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden, worked sideways along
Fifty-third Street, and the galleries were strung along a rather narrow
and inflexible route. In 1996, the Dorset Hotel (fondly remembered for
its exiguous lobby and slow elevators) and several adjacent brownstones
on Fifty-third and Fifty-fourth came up for sale, and the museum
acquired them, giving it a property stretching from St. Thomas Church,
on Fifth Avenue, to the Museum of American Folk Art, a few doors up from
Sixth Avenue. A thorough redesign was now possible, and it was entrusted
to Taniguchi Associates, a Tokyo firm for whom this was the first
international commission.

The inkling, in the winter of 1928-1929, shared by three well-to-do women
(Mrs. John D. Rockefeller, Jr., Miss Lizzie P. Bliss, and Mrs. Cornelius
J. Sullivan), that New York should have a venue for the display of
distinctly modern art had in seventy-five years bloomed into a cultural
force able to commandeer swaths of midtown real estate and erect new
buildings at a cost approaching a billion dollars. The goal for the
capital campaign was set at eight hundred and fifty-eight million
dollars; more than seven hundred million has already been secured, with
the Board of Trustees contributing a total of more than five hundred
million. The project included the acquisition, as a temporary exhibition
site and a permanent storage and study facility, of the old,
hundred-and-sixty-thousand-square-foot staple factory now labelled MoMA
QNS. The renovations and new construction at the midtown museum alone
came to four hundred and twenty-five million.

A broad, slightly sloping lobby, paved in green slate, now connects
Fifty-third and Fifty-fourth Streets and provides two entrances to the
museum. On the eastern side, an eight-story Education and Research
Building named for Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman has arisen, and on the
western side a thirteen-story tower for offices and galleries. In the
middle, the lower seven floors of Pelli’s tall dark tower have been
incorporated into the museum. Outside on Fifty-third Street, the façades
of the 1939 structure, with its piano-shaped canopy and square windows,
and of the 1964 addition by Philip Johnson, whose larger, milled-steel
windows have rounded corners, are refurbished and preserved—a satisfying
historical touch in an urban environment not given to many such. The
buildings, which endow the museum with a midtown presence to rival the
Metropolitan’s grand gracing of the upper East Side, defer to their
surroundings. Viewed from Fifty-third Street, through the dust and
clamor of construction still in progress, the structure behind its
medley of façades does not present an arresting silhouette, like Frank
Lloyd Wright’s top-shaped Guggenheim or Frank Gehry’s titanium flourish
in Bilbao. The new MoMA is not that kind of showpiece. Rather, its six
stories of reticent white chambers, tucked under Pelli’s overbearing
gray-and-brown glass tower, melt into the cityscape and form, with their
treasures, an invisible cathedral.

It used to be said that airports were our new cathedrals, the spires
replaced by ascending and descending planes. But they have become
workaday and shabby, cluttered with the machinery of heightened security
and menaced by airline bankruptcy—bus terminals on the brink, more like
refuse-littered marketplaces than like places of worship. The art
museums, once haunted by a few experts, students, and idlers, have
become the temples of the Ideal, of the Other, of the something else
that, if only for a peaceful moment, redeems our daily getting and
spending. Here resides something beyond our frantic animal existence.
Leonardo spoke scornfully of those men who do nothing in their time on
earth but produce excrement. Art, in its traditional forms of painting,
drawing, and sculpture, is a human by-product whose collection, in
homes, galleries, and museums, lightens the load, as it were, of life.
By its glow we bask in the promise of a brighter, more lasting realm
reached by a favored few—St. Vermeer, St. Pollock, St. Leonardo. In
Paris and Florence, tourists from Japan come by the busful, pose
giggling for a photograph in front of the “Mona Lisa” or “The Birth of
Venus,” and hurry on their way, blessed.

The old European museums are often converted palaces—the former residences
of aristocrats whose duty to the masses was, by a curious clause in the
social contract, conspicuous expenditure. So, too, their American
imitations, monuments to the Mellons and the Fricks and the Havemeyers;
the damask-covered walls and carved marble lintels compete, in a general
outpouring of luxury, with the incalculably high-priced works on
display. Everywhere, moldings, marble, fluted columns; the frames
themselves are princely. But a new kind of opulence, submerged in an
exquisite modesty, elaborately defers to the art itself. The
seven-year-old Beyeler Museum, on the outskirts of Basel, was designed
by Renzo Piano with the septuagenarian Mr. Beyeler at his elbow, urging
(according to an informal talk he gave to a touring group of which I was
a member) less architecture and more focus on his paintings. They are
lit with the latest louvred devices and mounted in a structure of noble
simplicity, its cost of more than forty million dollars reflected mostly
in the fine workmanship and elegant materials. The long low building
slips into the watery, suburban landscape like a sword into a green
sheath. The reddish porphyry of the walls is, it gave me pleasure to
notice, an echo of the local sandstone used to build the medieval Basel
cathedral, now a Protestant church with cloisters and a spectacular High
Gothic pulpit.

According to Russell Lynes’s 1973 book, “Good Old Modern: An Intimate
Portrait of the Museum of Modern Art,” so-called modern art at the time
of the museum’s founding was ill regarded by the public. In 1921, a show
of Impressionists and Post-Impressionists at the Metropolitan Museum of
Art was greeted, eight years after the notorious Armory Show, with
outrage verging on the apoplectic. A four-page printed protest decreed,
“This ‘Modernistic’ degenerate cult is simply the Bolshevic philosophy
applied to art,” and went on to claim:

The real cult of “Modernism” began with a small group of neurotic
Ego-Maniacs in Paris who styled themselves “Satanists”—worshippers of
Satan—the God of Ugliness.

The Metropolitan did not venture to show modern art soon again, helping
create the vacuum that the female founders of MoMA hoped to fill: the
Museum of Modern Art has been called “the Metropolitan’s worst mistake.”
In 1929, apropos of the infant moma’s inaugural show, Jerome Klein wrote
in the Boston Transcript:

For a number of years the worthy trustees of America’s greatest museum,
the Metropolitan Museum of Art, have been subjected to considerable
embarrassment; a great many people have had the bad taste to inquire in
the public prints why the competent administrators of the museum have
taken no cognizance of the emergence of art in the world of today. . . .
The clamor grew and the trustees and their henchmen awoke one day to the
horrible discovery that Cézanne and his upstarts had for years been
taken up by the best society.

Now even the hoi polloi accept as obvious the beauty and power of the
Post-Impressionists; long lines form at their megashows, and the museum
stores do a busy trade in prints, posters, shopping bags, and notepads
consecrated with their imagery. Fragileappearing, jokey modernism—its
little Cubist canvases and even smaller visual witticisms by Klee, its
yellowing collages and deadpan Dada stunts—grew and grew and eventually
tore down the Dorset.

The new building inevitably incorporates modernism’s problematical nature.
When does modern art begin? Some say with Manet, and he did, with his
individualized nudes in everyday settings, affront the bourgeoisie; but
then so did Courbet, who nonetheless belongs to the old dispensation.
The Impressionists were revolutionaries, and we still inhabit their
revolution. But MoMA began with the Post-Impressionists, and they make a
good starting point, around 1880. Their modernism has a theoretical,
abstractifying bent and a determined individuality of style, so that no
mature artist can be confused with another, as a Monet might be with a
Pissarro. Though the Post-Impressionists still represent the visible
world, the reproduction of natural appearances is no longer the heart of
the game. We like them because, after centuries of shadowy, complicated
illusionism, they used bold colors and simplified shapes. We value them
for the resistance they met, and they earn our love with their
suffering—van Gogh in the insane asylum, Gauguin adrift in the high
seas, Seurat dying young, Cézanne plodding to the easel day after day in
eremitic isolation. All of them died before their immortality was widely
acknowledged.

And when will modern art end? Robert Hughes, in “The Shock of the New,”
muscularly argues that it died around 1970, with Andy Warhol’s anomic
embrace of “business art” and the passing of the concept of the
avant-garde. By the seventies, a persuasive cultural permissiveness made
a cutting edge impossible; suddenly, after Action painting, Pop, Op,
color-field, and minimalism, art ran out of nameable movements. There
was no more “modern”; there was just “contemporary.” Glenn D. Lowry,
moma’s director since 1995, addresses in a thoughtful essay the museum’s
history and its situation—doubled attendance, proliferating
collections—prior to Taniguchi’s twenty-first-century expansion:

A number of options were available, from ceasing to collect contemporary
art altogether—never a serious possibility—to establishing a separate
museum for contemporary art, which, however, in establishing a division
between the earliest and the most recent works in the collection, would
have created more problems than it solved.

The new museum’s layout is open-ended, with a double-height, column-free
space set aside on the reinforced second floor for contemporary art—its
sheets of warped steel, its mountains of bricks or tin cans or lavender
Teddy bears, its mazy installations and messy assemblages. Whatever
contemporary art is not (pleasurable, say, or exquisite), it is big, and
Taniguchi has created a giant room for it, stealing height from the
floor above and providing a sliding door whereby oversized sculpture can
be gantried in from the street. What is left of the third floor contains
galleries for photographs, drawings, and architecture and design. The
next floor up, the fourth, is intended for work, such as the large
canvases of the Abstract Expressionists, from the postwar period to
1970, and the fifth, accessible via a grand staircase, will shelter the
relatively handy works of classic modernism, from the end of the
nineteenth century. The sixth floor is reserved for special exhibitions,
to which escalators and elevators are expected to carry the multitudes.

The first floor will hold, besides the entry lobby and the desks for
admission and membership, the commercial enterprises increasingly
conspicuous among a museum’s attractions, the bookstore/shop and the
restaurant—restaurants, in this case, fancy in proportion to their
nearness to the Sculpture Garden. Farther from it is the bar and the bar
food, in a space fittingly named for the museum’s first director, Alfred
H. Barr, Jr. Then there is, with a close view of the garden and, in
season, some outdoor tables, the restaurant de résistance, bluntly
called the Modern and generalled by a name chef, Gabriel Kreuther,
sprung from the Ritz-Carlton on Central Park South. All eating places
(and there are more, on the second and fifth floors) will be operated by
Danny Meyer’s Union Square Hospitality Group. The first-floor
establishments will be entered by a kind of speakeasy entrance from noon
until as late as eleven-thirty; one looks forward to a heist movie in
which Robert De Niro and George Clooney sneak upstairs from their 11
p.m. espresso and brandy to appropriate some Picassos and Brancusis.
And, oh yes—the Sculpture Garden, wider and longer, has been born again
with new young trees to replace the birches and beeches that had been
getting too shaggy anyway.

The cathedral stands ready for the faithful. Here they come: the
slow-footed tourists, foreign and domestic; the suburban adventuresses
in for lunch; the Brearley seniors with their spiral-bound sketchbooks
and their flaxen tresses; the semi-unshaven East Village youth, two
years out of Podunk, looking for an art fix even if it means sitting
through Andy Warhol’s static epic “Empire.” A few pilgrims, perhaps,
will turn back from the counter when they are told that the admission
fee is twenty dollars and a mere twelve and sixteen, respectively, for
students and sixty-five-and-overs who have the I.D.s to prove it. But a
balcony seat at a failing Broadway musical costs three times that, and
MoMA floor space has been increased by almost half again, from
eighty-five thousand square feet to a hundred and twenty-five thousand.

Is more truly more? MoMA, which I first visited in the late
nineteen-forties, was a relatively intimate collection of human-scale
works in non-palatial rooms. Picasso’s “Guernica,” on loan to keep it
away from Franco, and Rousseau’s “Sleeping Gypsy” were the biggest
canvases in sight; Baziotes, Dubuffet, and Peter Blume were the latest
things on the walls. You could hustle through it in an hour or two, on a
one-way route. With the expansion of 1964, which added the great
Picasso-Matisse room, some choices for ambulation were offered; but it
was still, on the second floor, a single experience. Now four floors,
plus soundproof galleries for video and media, beckon from all sides.
One of the charms of a museum for modern art was that there wasn’t too
much of it, just as a lifetime of history wasn’t too much. After
seventy-five years, a life is a stretch and the cathedral may have too
many chapels. “Nous verrons,” as Cézanne might remark, squinting toward
Mont Sainte-Victoire. We shall see.